Whither the Taxis?

Apparently, the taxi situation has gotten so bad that it attracted the attention of the mainstream media. Additionally, with my own personal experiences, even services offered by car-sharing companies are getting harder to use, as more and more people use the services.

Instead of blaming the drivers or the car-sharing companies, we should focus on ensuring that we are not over-regulating, and allow a healthy alternative to the taxi system in Singapore. One of the drivers in the article mentioned using the bus lanes during peak hours, which I think is a good idea. Another one was complaining about the 250km per day requirement, which is rather on the high end in my opinion – perhaps it can be reduced to 150km. Also, we should bring back the yellow-top taxi scheme to compete with Uber and GrabTaxi.

Car-sharing companies should be more regulated, though. Ensuring that a crime doesn’t occur, and bad eggs taking advantage of loopholes or grey areas of their services needs to be done, as they are privately-operated, and we need to have a guarantee of service.